Turns out that making Google search unusable was an intentional strategy by the company.
Turns out that making Google search unusable was an intentional strategy by the company.
24 comments
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I thought this was somewhat common knowledge, but having the documents on the public record instead of just the word of an ex-engineer should be a big deal.
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Godamnit. It's so hard to guess which parts of the world suck from incompetence and which ones from active evil nowadays.
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Of course, Doctorow already described this phenomenon in the essay about enshittification. It's no surprise the advertising company will pivot to advertisers and shareholders rather than users.
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I had assumed that everyone had already read and internalized this very well written article, The Man Who Killed Google Search by Ed Zitron
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I am also bad about assuming everyone has my exact knowledge set.
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Capitalism reduces inefficiency and bolsters competition and innovation they said.
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When using a search engine whete you know what site you want info from, you can add
site:hexbear.netto the search, for exampleis communism okay site:hexbear.netwould only return results from hexbeari stopped using google 'as intended' a long time ago, i mostly use it because i can't spell for shit
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sadly they broke a bunch of the boolean keywords and use of quotes a long time ago
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and use of quotes
yeah, that's mostly why it's useless to me now.
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This has been known since 2008 by marketers. Even Google employees outright stated it at conferences.
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This is why we need to go back to personally-curated site directories
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Capitalist innovation at home:
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Anyone tried any "premium" search offerings? I have a tech friend recommending Kagi and I wonder if anyone here has opinions about it.
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I've been using meta search engines like 4get, searxng and whoogle right now.
4get has been really nice for me.
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Know of any Google alternatives that allow equivalent dorking? SearX doesn't do the trick.
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I'll add a second recommendation for Kagi. Being able to block sites (like Pinterest) is a game changer too. Their search, though ridiculous at first to bring yourself to pay for what was once free, is more than worth it.
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I use Kagi, highly recommend. I’ve found it tends to be better at filtering out blogspam and I use the “quick answer” feature a ton.
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Interesting. I'm not enamored with the idea of paying for something that used to be high quality for free though :(
My google results are just completely filled with AI shit on any new topic though. And any old topic where I'm specificallllllly looking for a page I know exists because I've read it before the site gives me trash that's new-ish instead of the older page I know is perfect and doesn't need any new variation and should just be the best result for that thing forever lol.
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it would probably depend on your search needs and habits. i use searx as my main search and it works good enough even if results are not great. i tried kagi for a bit and i didn't find a huge difference. it might have been a bit better with results and being able to group results is a great idea but the improvement was not sustancial enough to warrant the cost. also, having an account associated with your searches feels really problematic
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I think there's a real chance google could be broken up. They've lost a couple of major antitrust cases in the past year but it remains to be seen what the judges will do. I think it's going to be difficult for everything that isn't ads to survive though if ads is what gets cut out.
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:bill-hicks-shining:
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need Bill Hicks emojis
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24 comments